Paris Cité University

It is rare for a university to have its own name legally overturned and then reborn again within months. Here, that happened: after an appeal, the Conseil d’État annulled the decree provision that set the merged institution’s name as “University of Paris” on 29 December 2021—and the university had to rebrand as Université Paris Cité in March 2022.

A merger that had to be named twice

Today you’re listening to Université Paris Cité—a public research university created by decree on 20 March 2019. It was the result of merging Paris-Descartes (Paris V) and Paris-Diderot (Paris VII), universities created following the 1970 division of the University of Paris. The merger was scheduled for 1 January 2019, but the legal creation of the new institution came with that 20 March 2019 decree, bringing together a medical and research ecosystem long associated with the University of Paris Faculty of Medicine, founded around 1200, alongside Sorbonne University. One less obvious thread runs through the administrative fine print. The Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP) was integrated as a “component-institution,” and crucially, it retained its legal personality when the main universities were reorganized.